Then I felt rather than heard his soft shaky mutter.
"Le long de mon calvaire ... mon calvaire, mon Dieu! ... effaçons l'horrible passé ... rien n'est fini, tout recommence... tout recommence...."
That wretched, wretched song! It had suddenly made it impossible for me to go on.
"I suppose you went over to ask the name of it?" I said sullenly; I almost said "The name of the beastly thing."
"It's called 'Il est venu le Jour."
"Coincidences are stupid things."
"I dare say."
And another long silence fell between us.
Nevertheless I had not taken a special journey to St Briac merely to listen to his disturbed breathing. What I had seen that afternoon had taken matters far beyond that. If he, in his situation, thought he could do thus and thus, I was there to see, to the limit of my power, that he did not. I had already told him so, in those words. He had made a stiff reply. Then had come that calamitous song, and our present silence.
"Well ... you can't, and there's an end of it, Derry," I said, quietly but flatly.
"So I understood you to say."
"It's what I came specially to tell you."
"I gathered that too. By the way, if you want to send your car away there's a Casino bus going in at ten o'clock. No need to waste money."
"We may not have finished our talk by then."
"Then we can finish it in the bus. I'd thought of going in myself."
"To hang about that house?"
"You and the gendarmerie can stop that easily enough."
We were back at the same point—that we, between whom a quarrel was impossible, must apparently nevertheless quarrel.
"Look here," I said at last, "can't you see my position?"
"I can. It's a rotten one."
"If I saw the faintest glimmer of hope——"
"Espérance," he muttered.
"——even from their point of view. Aird isn't a fool. He heard Jennie speak in French to you, evidently the very first time she had spoken to you—regular monkeys'-paradebusiness from his point of view—and he draws his own conclusions. And Mrs Aird isn't a fool either. She won't be in London two days before she's found out all about your mother."
"I see all that."
"Your mother didn't marry an Arnaud."
"Quite right. She'll know that too."
"And Aird's athlete enough to know you're no more poitrinaire than he is."
"I once saw him score a ripping try on the Rectory Ground. I was about twenty."
"You haven't a paper to your name."
"Not one."
"You can't even get back to England."
"Oh, I wouldn't go so far as to say that."
"And you're no better off if you do."
"That remains to be seen too."
"Then Mrs Aird's a writer herself. She knows every word Derwent Rose ever wrote."
"Oh, I had a reader here and there," he replied nonchalantly.
"And she wants to meet you—not Arnaud, but Derwent Rose. I'm to take you round there."
I felt his smile. "That would be the deuce of a hole for you to be in, George. You'd simply have to say you couldn't find me."
"But Derwent Rose is supposed to be alive somewhere. Nobody's heard of his death."
"One man extra, one man missing, so it's as-you-were. Anyway nobody'll worry much about that. I never had a tenth of your readers."
"And you're bound to be caught out here sooner or later on the question of domicile."
"Not if I see them first," he replied grimly.
"Derry, you're my despair."
"Oh, don't despair, George. Never despair. It will be all right. What about sending that car away? No good wasting good francs. You see, we've finished our talk."
"We haven't begun it yet."
"Then for goodness sake let's begin and get it over."
"Very well. Get ready.... I stood by you at the tramway office this afternoon. I saw what was given you there. I know what you have tucked away somewhere about you at this moment."
He had asked for it, and had got it. Hitherto I had stuck to generalities; that this was particular enough I knew by his quick movement. His foot knocked against the flimsy table, and a coffee-cup all but fell. He spoke in a low but harsh voice.
"That's not on the agenda, Coverham."
"Pardon me."
"It's not, and it's not going to be."
"If you prefer it in French, it's afait accompli."
"You mean you'll bring matters to a head by telling them over there?" He jerked his head in the direction of Ker Annic.
"That rests with you, here and now."
He muttered. At first I could not distinguish the words. Then I heard, "No, not here ... now if you like ... it's got to come, I suppose...."
He rose. "Very well," he said. "I'm ready."
"Wait a moment till I've paid for the coffee."
"Oh, I'll wait all right."
I entered the hotel and paid. When I came out again I looked right and left for him; then I saw his black smock and corduroys by a lighted door half-way across the Square. I joined him, and together we took the dark street to the right that leads to where the Calvary stretches out its arms across the harbour to Lancieux.
Past the Post Office, past the Mairie we walked without speaking—that Mairie that either as an Englishman or a Frenchman knew him not. We ascended the short lane to the promontory. It was a whispering half-tide, but all was darkness save for a low remnant in the west, a twinkle or two over the shallows, and once more Fréhel, this time directly visible and giving us distinct shadows. The last gossip had disappeared from the point. I don't think even a couple of lovers lingered on the steep below. It was him and myself for it, with the Calvary above us and that twelve-miles-distant Giant as timekeeper of our encounter.
But he did an unexpected thing before he spoke. Under Fréhel's sweeping finger the Calvary started forth for a moment from the shadows. He advanced to it, dipped his knee, and crossed himself.
Then he turned to me.
"Well——" he said quietly.
I waited. It was he who began.
"Don't think I don't see the force of everything you've said. Every word of it's true, and a child could see it. For one hole you can pick in the position I can pick five hundred. But picking holes doesn't help. What you aren't allowing for is the force of circumstances."
"It's the force of circumstances I've been trying to point out," I said, as quietly as he had spoken.
"I'm speaking of the circumstancesIfind myself in, the pressure that drivesmeto do what I am doing. You don't think I'm deceiving these decent people as a matter of choice, do you?"
"You say what you've got to say. I'll tell you what I think by and by."
"I'venochoice. I'm driven to it, can't escape it; it's my handicap. I want you to look at it for a moment from my end. What's the very first thing I've got to do? To lie about my name. I must lie, knowing perfectly well that a day, a week or a month or two at the outside will see me caught out and shown the door. Never mind other instances; let's stick to that one; the rest are just the same, only a good deal worse, some of 'em. Now here's the point. Do you suppose I should put my head into a noose like that unless I was perfectly sure that I'd finished sliding, was well dug in, and had a fairly reasonable prospect of presently going straight ahead like anybody else?"
But I had no intention of going over that ground again. My foolish excited hope that he might "pull it off" had beenscattered to the winds by the events of that afternoon. As far as he himself was concerned I wished him all the best that could happen to him, but it was not a chance that the happiness and safety of the daughter of my friends could be risked upon. Let him start to go forward first; let us have some assurance that the ghastly business was all over; then would be time enough to talk about the rest.
"We've had all that," I interrupted him.
"We haven't, George," he said earnestly. "You don't know. You can't possibly know. You've no idea of the care—the tests——"
"If it comes off all right nobody will rejoice more than I shall, Derry. What's between us at the moment is what happened this afternoon."
Instantly I was conscious of his hardening. But he did not become granite all at once.
"That can't be dragged in."
"'Dragged in'!"
"Can't you accept the situation, George?"
"No."
"Not if I solemnly assure you that I have a good chance?"
"When it's a proved certainty we'll talk about it."
"Not if I tell you my mind's perfectly made up?"
"That's the point."
"Not if it meant a breach between you and me?"
"It looks as if I had to have a breach with somebody."
"Your friends. I know. I've admitted all that. It's beastly. But I'm afraid it can't be allowed to make any difference."
"Suppose I denounce you?"
"I'm sure you'll act perfectly conscientiously whatever you do."
"That would mean your complete exposure."
"I'm prepared for that."
"You said the other night that you only wanted to see and talk to her. You said you'd go no further than that. Do you call what happened this afternoon keeping your word?"
"I meant what I said at the time. You know that I honestly hadn't a thought of deceiving you. I'm afraid that word can't be kept. Perhaps I hadn't quite realised."
"Have you realised yet?"
"Oh!"
"You haven't. Let me help you. And I'll put it as much in your favour as I can. I'll assume you're standing still for the present. I'll even assume the other possibility, or impossibility, whichever it is—that you might actually turn round again. Even then what would it mean? It would mean that I, a guest of my old friends, was lending my countenance to something against every conception of mental—decency let us say. I think I know your dates and figures pretty well by this time. You were born in '75. Now, in 1920, we'll say you're eighteen. It's taken you forty-five years to live to eighteen, and if you're to live to forty-five again it will have taken you—how long?—seventy-two years. It will then be getting on for 1950. Jennie was born in 1903. You're now forty-five to her seventeen. If this thing comes off you'll be in the early forties together. But at the same time you'll be over seventy. Look at it, Derry—look at it."
"Look at it? I have looked at it. I'll look at it again if you like.... Now I've looked at it again. Only you and I know it. And anyway there's nothing in it."
"Julia Oliphant knows it."
"Then only you and I and Julia Oliphant know it, and there's nothing in it."
"Then tell me if there's anything in this. What guarantee have you that exactly the same thing won't happen to you again? Take the maddest view of all—that you actually might go forward. If indications are anything you're repeating your experiences already."
"How so?" he demanded.
"In this painting of yours. I heard your explanations to Mrs Aird this afternoon. You're starting with exactly the same ideas as before—complete dissociation from everything else that's ever been done. You're going to be theFirst Man again instead of the Millionth Man. How do you know it won't land you in the same mess? It used to be words; now it's paint, and that's all the difference I see."
There was a long pause; then I heard his soft, almost indulgent laugh.
"Look here, George," he said slowly. "I'll make you a fair offer. Can't you and I come to terms if I swear to you that I'll never touch another canvas or brush or pen or sheet of paper as long as I live? Willthatsatisfy you?"
"I'm afraid not."
"But doesn't that meet your objection, old fellow?"
"No. Because you'd be the same man whether you wrote or painted or not!"
"But how on earth can I alter that?"
I seized on his words. "Exactly. That's my whole meaning. You can't alter it. Whether you do the same or not, youarethe same. For all I know you'll go on being it till the crack of doom. It's yourself that's been visited, not your books. And that's why things can't go on between you and Jennie Aird."
"Then you're going to stand between us as long as I am I?"
"That's about the size of it."
"Doesn't it strike you as a little—hard, George?" he asked slowly.
"Yes," I admitted doggedly. "But you'll be bearing it, not she."
By the swinging beam of Fréhel I saw that his head was bowed. Without my noticing it the riding-lights in the little harbour below had disappeared; as no boat could now put in till dawn the pécheurs had waded across the shallows and extinguished them. The tall Crucifix seemed to advance and to retire again into the gloom with the next revolution of the Light.
Then he raised his head and asked about the last question I expected.
"About my money, George. You don't know exactly how much I've got?"
"No, not at this moment."
"Who bought the stuff?"
"I sold it in the best market I could find."
Ironically came his reply. "Hasn't it got a name? Are there two of us?... Anyway, without worrying you too much about it, I'd like an account soon. I want that matter cleared up."
"Well, never mind furniture at present. That's a detail."
"Oh no it isn't!" he answered quickly. "We seem to have different ideas as to what's detail. You've given me quite a lot of what I call detail. This is important.—You really don't remember the name of the man who bought that furniture of mine?" he mocked me.
"I've already told you you can draw to any reasonable amount."
"I see.... Is this it, that my furniture isn't sold at all, and you're advancing me money on the security of it?"
"Security, Derry!"
"And I still have my furniture and I owe you five hundred francs?"
"Must we talk about this now?"
There was no mistake about the granite this time.
"Yes, we'd better," he said curtly. "We've wasted time enough about things that don't matter that"—he snapped his fingers. "I've listened to what you've got to say, and now I'm going to ask you to listen to me. I owe you five hundred francs, for which I'm most sincerely obliged. But I don't think I should have asked you if I'd known. And I want you to understand that it's all I do owe you."
"Derry, old fellow——"
"Tut-tut! One tale's always good till you hear the other side. It doesn't seem to strike you that you've made pretty free with me. I'm a subject for sums and mental arithmetic exercises—you're better at that than at accounts. I'm some kind of an oddity, that's got to be shoo-ed with an apron thisway and that, and told where he's to go and not to go, and who he shall speak to and who he shan't. You'd be best pleased of all if you could shut your eyes and tell yourself that I didn't exist. But I do exist, and I'm not on sale for five hundred francs. I'm here on earth, and I don't see what you're going to do about it. I'm not less alive than anybody else; I'm more alive—a hundred times more alive. You can call me any age you please—but who'd be locked up, you or I, if you showed me to any reasonable being and told them I was forty-five? Care to try it on the Airds? I'll give you the chance if you like."
Bitterly as he spoke, he grew bitterer as he proceeded.
"This is not the first time you've interfered. You've made free with my latchkey before this. Julia Oliphant knows about me; who told her, and who gave you permission? It seems to me I've been pretty patient. I'm not saying you've not been decent about some things, that time when I was slipping about all over the scale, but I'm warning you now. I've listened to all you had to say. I've met you at every point. I've even offered—I'm hanged if I know why—not to write or paint again if that will please you. But beyond that——"
Then came an outburst the contempt of which I cannot reproduce.
"Writing! Painting! Books! Pictures! As iftheyhad any more to do with life than a baby playing with its doll! They're to help fools to think they're thinking. They're to make 'em believe that but for some slight accident they could do the same themselves—as they could, and do! They call a thing like that a 'gift'; but what's the Gift that Life still has to give when they've said their very last word—they and their schools? What's been there all the time, waiting for us to get the dust out of our eyes?... George Coverham, try to come between me and that and as sure as God will bring to-morrow morning I'll put a stop to your arithmetic for ever! What do I care if I have to take a new name every day? What do I care if your friends the Airds bundle you out of the house? Do you think it matters to mewhose father and mother and family history and papers I steal? That's all life seems to mean to some of you. 'Where did he come from? Who knows him? Is he French or English? What does he do for his living? Has he paid his Income Tax? Is he respectable? What did he do in the war? Where does he bank? What's his club? Where does he live and how much is his rateable value?' You can't see a man for allthat! You can't even see me now for Derwent Rose and his tombstones of books! By Jove, I said I was a ghost once! But that was when I was on the slide! I'm no ghost now! It's you others who are the ghosts! It's you who'd better get off the map! J'y suis, j'y reste; I'm here—here!"
And again Fréhel showed him there—young, beautiful, indomitable and ruthless.
Yet what did he utter but his own deeper and deeper condemnation? Simple, heart-full, innocent Jennie Aird be mated with his piercing and impossible view of the world! She herself, yes, even in her body's beauty, to be what his books had formerly been, what his painting was to be again—the very medium of his transcendental transgression! Why, one peep at that awful sleeping dynamo of his mind would be enough to drive her mad, one glimpse of the experience that had been his suffice to shrivel her opening heart for ever! Did he think to put off his flames and clouds and lightnings every time he whispered a love-word into her ear? What fate would be hers, poor Semele, did he forget, as he had forgotten before now, and put forth the enormousness of his power by her side? With every word he spoke it was less and less to be thought of. As far as my own carcass was concerned he might do what he pleased. I would not stand by and see it done. His vision and will might exceed mine a thousandfold, but even in my humble heart glimmered the small flame of what I considered to be my duty. I faced him, waiting for the Light again.
"Very well," I said as it came over his face. "Am I to take that as your last word?"
"If you please."
"Then hear mine. I have a car waiting just off the Square. You may knock me on the head, as you've already threatened. At least I shall have no further responsibility for you then. But unless you do that I'm going to get straight into that car, drive to Ker Annic, and tell the Airds the whole thing before I go to bed. You'll then have the satisfaction that it's a straight fight in the open, and that you aren't creeping like a blight into a happy house under a name that isn't even your own."
He spoke very, very slowly. "You mean that, George?"
"Enough. I'm going to stand here without moving till the next time that Light shows your face. Then I shall do what I've said."
And I stood, still as the rocks at the foot of the Crucifix, giving him his chance.
The darkness seemed an omnipresent thing, positive rather than an absence, that invaded and became part of me, of him, of the place, of the hour. Not a star was to be seen, not one speck in the immensity of the night. I did not even look where I knew his black-bloused figure to be; his hand might have been uplifted for all I knew. Or for all I cared. Once more I was weary to death of him and his domination. There was not room for both of us. He might have the field henceforward to himself. I had done what I could.
It was an eleven-seconds interval. The Light came. Still I did not look at him. The Light passed away again.
Four seconds, and once more the Light.
Eleven seconds, the Light, four seconds, the Light....
Then only did I look up.
I had not heard him move, but he had done so. He had sunk to the rocks at the foot of the Calvary, the rocks worn smooth with the sitting of generations of evening gossips. I heard a faint choke.
Then his voice came.
"Isn't it—isn't it a little rough on a fellow, sir?"
In a moment I was on my knees by his side. "Derry! Derry! Derry!" I repeated over and over again. It was all the speech I could find.
"Isn't it rough on a fellow, sir? Isn't it? Isn't it?"
"Derry my boy, my boy!"
"I feel you're right in a way, sir—you're bound to be wiser than I am—but when I heard them singing that song this evening ... le long de mon calvaire ... en espérant j'ai pu souffrir ... rien n'est fini, tout recommence ... it seemed so like it all, sir—you don't know—you've no idea——"
I rocked him gently in my arms.
"You don't know—you can't possibly know—nobody knows who hasn't been through it. Mon calvaire—mon Dieu! And to have it hurt you like that just because you areableto hope! Not the end after all, but the beginning of everything! Oh, can't you see it, sir—not even a little bit of it?"
"Yes, talk, my boy—get it over——"
"I shall be all right in a minute. It simply got me by the throat. That song, I mean. I suppose it's just an ordinary song really—the French are like that—but it got me by the throat, it was so like me. So like the way things have been with me. What did they say it was called? I've forgotten."
"'Il est venu le Jour.'"
"Yes, that's it. The day's come. After all that. It came that night—I'm not making a joke, sir—that night in the garden. It's been day ever since. Night's been day, like a soft sun shining all night. And I wouldn't ask you to lift a finger to help me if I didn't know it was quite all right. I do know. It's she who's made everything all right. That's the funny thing about her—that she's made everything perfectly all right again. I wonder why that is?"
"Don't wonder. Just stay quiet a while."
"But a fellow can't help wondering a bit. Why shouldit have made everything all right the moment I set eyes on her? But she did. I told you about something happening before, sir, something I can't quite remember about. That seemed like some sort of an emptying—leaving me all empty and aching, if you understand. But this filled it all up again, with happiness and I don't know what—lovely things—all since that night. That's what makes me so sure. I wouldn't say it if it wasn't true. It isn't the kind of thing one cares to be untruthful about, is it? You're in the same house with her—you see her—you know what I mean——"
Between this simplicity and his late menace, what could I say for his comfort, what do for my own? I was torn in two. I was a weary, elderly man, careworn and disillusioned; but he, through unimaginable tribulation, had mysteriously found this place of stillness and peace and hope. What his intimidation had not done, that his utter reliance and trust now began to do. He sat up on the rocks and began to talk.
"You know something about my life, sir. Miss Oliphant knows most, of course, but you know quite a lot. If it doesn't sound most awfully conceited, I was rather a nice sort of fellow at eighteen. All the same I always felt there was something not quite right. I don't mean anything I did; I mean there always seemed to be a sheet of thick glass between me and the things I wanted to get close to. I could see through it all right, all the brightness and the colours, but somehow I couldn't get any nearer. There wasn't any feel of warmth somehow. It may sound silly to you, but I used to press up against that glass like a kid at a shop window full of things he wanted. It wasn't that I wasn't fond of things and people and so on. I was frightfully fond of them. But I couldn't manage to let them know it. Even my mother. When she wasn't there I was tremendously fond of her, but when she came—I don't know—of course I was fond then—I suppose it was my imagination. But when she wasn't there she meant an enormous lot to me, and when she came she was just a nice little mother I was very fond of but never managed to let her know—just as if I wasashamed. And it was so with everything else. I used to get excited over Shakespeare and Juliet and Hamlet and Falstaff and all those people, but they made other people seem rather shadowy. Then, when I was about twenty-one, it worried me fearfully sometimes. Other people didn't seem to be like that. I wanted to be like other people. They hadn't blocks of glass in front of them all the time. Somehow they seemed so nice and happy and warm all the time. I had a dog I was really fonder of than I was of anybody! And I wanted to be fond. I'm afraid this sounds absolute rot, sir, but I can't explain it any better."
"I'm very much interested. Go on."
"Well, that's lasted more or less all through my life. I'd get all in a glow about things—just things, and of course people too in a way: somebody's hair under a stained-glass window in a church, or the organ or the Psalms. But always something in between, I don't know what. It worried me because I knew I was all glow inside if I could only get it out. I was awfully fond of Miss Oliphant, for instance, but I simply couldn't let her know it. I used to go and see her sometimes and sit there wondering about it. 'Now here's a jolly sort of girl,' I used to think, 'as good as they make 'em—good-looking, sometimes nearly beautiful—and awfully fond of you. Now why can't you get on with her? Why is there always something you don't say, don't really want to say perhaps, but it would make such a difference if you could say it?' I used to ask myself that, but there was never any answer. There never has been. There it always was, that sheet of glass, as polished as you please, but shutting me right out from everything everybody else seemed to have."
"But your books, Derry? You weren't shut out from everybody there!"
"Perhaps that was where it went. You can give things to other people in a book you can't when you're sitting next to them. That's why I don't care if I never do anything of that sort again. I want to get near.... And now"—his voice fell to a happy hush—"it's all right. That was whatshe did, all in a moment, all in one look. That glass went. That's why I know that as long as she's near to me no harm will happen to me. Oh, I know it."
Then, without the slightest warning, he broke into a heartrending appeal. It was as if he had suddenly remembered that I was not yet won over.
"Tout recommence! Mon calvaire, mon calvaire!... Have I to lose it the moment I see it? Must I go back the same way? Can't I go the other? Haven't I carried my poor little bit of a cross too, sir? Haven't I? Haven't I? J'ai vécu des heures cruelles.... And hasn't it sometimes been so heavy that I've prayed it would crush me and get it over? And even when I've done the rottenest things haven't I always wanted to do something better—always? Thank God for the glass those times anyway! Sometimes I've stood off and looked at myself and said: 'Poor devil, it isn't you really—if you must do this get it over as quick as you can and start afresh!' I've always started afresh. I never give up hope.... And do I get nothing at all at the end of it, sir? Are you going to scrape up all those bits of glass she broke, and put them together again, and send me back the same way? Not even a chance, now that everything reallyisbeginning again? Now that the day's come? Now that for a week every night's been like a soft warm sun shining? Are you going to turn me back?"
Oh, had he but knocked me on the head a quarter of an hour ago it would have been easier! Then had I been at rest, with those who had built desolate palaces for themselves before me. Or could I but have believed what he so firmly believed! Yet must I not almost believe it? Had he not now almost compelled me? What I had feared to find that morning at St Briac, the morning after the first meeting of their eyes over the car, had not happened, but something no less profound had. That hard clear obstruction that had stood immutably between him and life all his days had been taken away. I remembered my speculation as to whether there were not two loves, Jennie's and Julia's, a sacred and a profane. Two? How if he were right, and there were nottwo loves, but one love only, which is simply—Love? What then became of all my arithmetic, my rectitude, my conventions, even my duty to my friends? What, by comparison with that love, that law-annihilating love that breaks the invisible adamant fetters that bind the old Adam and bids the new man stand forth, were any or all of these things? They were no more than those social rates and taxes, registrations, commitments, undertakings, contracts, all the rest of the paper business of our lease of life on which he had lately poured his scorn. The infinitude of passion and suffering of a single human soul seemed to me to dwarf them all. And if a man must sin, let him sin at the fringe and circumference of things, not at their centre.
Could he give me any assurance whatever of these things he ached no more to enter his heaven than I ached to thrust him in.
Every four seconds, every eleven seconds, Fréhel opened the furnace of his white and blazing eye. Tremulously in and out of the gloom the Calvary seemed to advance and to recede again. Dimly I distinguished Derry's face—young, faithful, agonised, interceding for his lovelier self....
It is a fearful responsibility a man past his prime assumes when he bids such a creature to hope no more, but to veil his face and to return to the pit whence he was digged....
And how had he offended me? He had merely received a note—had not even given it, but had simply accepted it and held for a moment the fingers that had passed it....
Had I, in my own insignificant youth, never done such a thing?
"Derry," I said gently, "I can't go over old ground again. At present—I say at present—I'm staying in the house. I must now decide how much longer I can stay there. But first tell me exactly what it is you propose to do."
"I haven't any intentions at all, sir."
"At present you haven't. You hadn't before, but that didn't last. What is it you want?"
"Only that you shouldn't thrust me back into—that other."
"And then?"
"I can't think beyond that, sir."
"But there will be something beyond that."
He was silent while the Light revolved twice, thrice, then:
"Et revivre pour t'adorer ... like a soft warm sun even in the night," he breathed scarcely audibly. "You can't call it sleeping. Something blessed that you can't see is going on behind it all the time. Something seems to be breathing. That's what happens in the night now. It isn't sleeping; you're too happy to want to go to sleep. Then she smiles. Not like in the toyshop. She didn't smile in the toyshop; that was a different kind of look altogether. She smiled yesterday when we were having tea, but you weren't looking. And twice to-day—twice.... At first I was afraid my painting was going to excite me a bit, upset me. Once or twice it did a little. I didn't want to talk about it much this afternoon for fear of it upsetting me. But everything calms down when she looks and smiles. It's just her being there. There isn't any glass at all; the glass is between us two and everybody else in the world. Painting's perfectly safe with her by me—perfectly safe.... But nothing's safe without. I shall slip again without her now. I felt myself even begin to slip that time you said she was going away. It was frightening.... Don't ask me to try the experiment, sir; it's so horribly risky; but if they were to spring it on me that shewasgoing away I know quite well what would happen. It would be like before; I should have to pack up my traps and disappear again. And that time it would be the end.... But as long as I'm with her it's all clear ahead—the new way—the way I always tried to find and always missed—il est venu le jour——"
He was hardly speaking to me. Little as I could see of his face, I could divine what passed there. After that recent violence, this almost dumb meekness and awaiting my judgment. And because he was not speaking to me, but was communing with his own solitary soul as gravely as he had bent his knee before That which rose above us into the night, I knew that I must end by believing him. At a wordI could have sent her away. He had offered to put himself to the test of her departure. That he might be believed he had even offered to risk once more that hideous hiatus in his life.
But it was not demonstration that swayed me to my irrevocable act. It was rather that transcending love that he himself had invoked. Love and pity lest this my son should once more be cast to the wolves of pain welled up like a sudden fountain in my heart. Nay, not from my own poor heart did it well, but from That above us that showed its dim crowned head and outspread arms every four seconds, every eleven seconds, four times a minute, cloaked itself in the night again, and again softly reappeared with the sweep of the occulted Light—from That I think my pity descended. No thought for the morrow had that Original taken, no care of father or mother or friend, but only for the weak and the outcasts of the world. Who was outcast if this grave and destiny-ridden young figure before me was not? I had stood before him waiting for him to strike me down; now in his patience and submission he struck me down.
I could leave the Airds. I could turn my back on them for ever. This dark-bloused lad was my loved son, who mutely implored me to be given his chance. Were the Airds to die I should have to part from them. Death, that comes unannounced at any moment, parts us from all our friends. My portrait need never hang in the Lyonnesse Club to remind Madge Aird that she had once had a friend who had betrayed her. I need not even return to England. So Derry might but establish himself, what did it matter though I wandered? I had no love, nobody had a love for me, such as that that made his days and nights softly radiant. In a few years I should be gone. But he would be once more in the glory of his prime, living a life of my giving. In him would be my resurrection. To help him over this dead point the rest of my life was at his service.
His prayer should be answered.
But not without a stipulation. When all is said one hasto be practical. Should she after all fail to lead him by the hand forward again into those fair and untrodden fields of life, all was rescinded. He must report progress. No step must be taken without my knowledge. One does not meditate a treason against one's friends quite so light-heartedly as all that. Nor need he yet be told what I had in my mind. I turned to him.
"I shall go back now," I said.
He did not speak.
"But I shall do nothing to-night. In fact I won't do anything till I've seen you again."
He did not thank me in words.
"But the understanding is that you do nothing either. Is that agreed?"
"I promise that, sir."
"Then that's all. I'm very tired. I think I want to sleep."
"Won't you lean on my shoulder, sir?"
"Perhaps I will——"
Only to touch her willing hand—only to carry her letter in his breast—only to feel that in the unison of their two hearts the rest of the world might be lost in oblivion——
My reason for not telling him of my decision was that I did not wish him to have the uneasiness of knowing that he was responsible for it. Nor am I apologising for the mood in which I had made my choice. I had done so, however, without very much regard for necessary and practical details. These it was that I began to turn over in my mind as, racked and restless, I lay in my bed that night.
And first of all I began to realise that my choice involved me straight away in that very web of sophistry and dissimulation that I had wished to avoid. I had imagined on the spur of the moment that by walking out of the Airds' house with the most plausible explanation I could find, or for thatmatter none at all, I should be observing some sort of a decency to the roof that had so hospitably sheltered me. But when I came to look at it again!... Good God, what sort of decency was that? To begin with, when you walk away from somewhere you walk to somewhere, and where was I to walk to? Away from Dinard altogether? That would be to walk away from Derry. Take him away with me? That would be to take him away from Jennie and all hope. Move to an hotel? I should be running into my late friends every hour, at every turn.
In a word, what I was contemplating was not war on the Airds, nor even a hypocritical neutrality. It was a vile assassination. And suddenly I saw, and with a most singular clearness, that my only way out, the only possible and honourable course, was not to leave the Airds and Dinard at all, but to leave the earth altogether. Believe me, who know, that that in the end is what contact with such a man as Derwent Rose amounts to.
But I cannot say that suicide, sentimental, religious or of whatever kind, has ever strongly attracted me. There was a much, much simpler way out. Derry knew nothing of what had passed through my mind while Fréhel's sweeping beam had conjured up that pallid Christ out of the darkness. I had not told him that I was prepared to sacrifice myself for him. All that he had been promised was a respite on terms till to-morrow.
A flood of mean gratitude swept over me that I had told him no more. I have never known a viler or more shameful ease than that that possessed me when it became plain that I could go back on him and he be none the wiser. I am not sure that my recreant lips had not the impudence to thank God that only I knew the depth of my cowardice and indecision.
For my plan was utterly impossible of execution. It was as impossible to give him his chance as I had found it to refuse it. Racked and restless I tossed. I even imagine I had a slight touch of delirium, for fantastic thoughts and images seemed to dance and interweave and pop up anddisappear again before me. I saw Derry back in Cambridge Circus again, and his black oak furniture played the most unamusing tricks. Sometimes his table would be a litter of newspapers and clothing and brown paper, with an overturned teacup and the two halves of a torn novel lying on the top; then it would magically clear itself, and Jennie would be standing by it, a sort of mental extension of Jennie, whose face, however, I did not see. His catalogued shelves of books would disappear, and there would be an easel in the middle of the room, and canvases round the walls, and these would change to the rugs and lacquer of Julia Oliphant's little recess.... Then the whole of Cambridge would slide obliquely away, and I would see Jennie's back as she mounted the ladder of a South Kensington Mews. Then he would appear from nowhere and take her in his arms, and he had a golden beard, and the next moment was riding in a hansom with nothing of Jennie visible but her slipper.... Julia Oliphant's slipper in the Piccadilly, Peggy and her garters, lots of slippers, Jennie's dancing slippers, Jennie in the Dinard Bazaar, Jennie at the guichet slipping a note into his hand. The ticking of my watch on the table annoyed me, but I did not get up, and presently I had ceased to hear it. Then it came again, regularly, irregularly, once every four seconds, once every eleven seconds, tick-tick, darkness and the Light, tick-tick, darkness and the Light....
So I tossed, waking every now and then with a start to tell myself that something must be done—where nothing was possible to be done.
And so, like Peter, I was prepared to deny him ere the cock crew.
I had, in fact, a touch of fever. The next morning I managed to dress for déjeuner, but when I entered the salon I must needs choose that moment to give a little lurch and stagger. Alec caught me.
"Here, what's all this about?" he said.
"It's all right."
He gave me a quick look. "It isn't all right. You'd better come upstairs to bed again."
So I was undressed, and back into bed I was put, my protests notwithstanding.
The affection with which I was treated certainly helped me very little in my resolution to glide like a snake noiselessly out of this house, leaving my poison behind me. Madge was in and out the whole of the afternoon, a perfect angel of attention and comfort; Alec hunted out an English doctor—I am sure he believed that a French one would subtly and diabolically have made away with me. I was told that I must stay in bed for some days. I demurred, but I really doubt whether I could have got up.
So they turned Ker Annic upside down for me. To leave father and mother and friends is a thing you have to do quickly and with immediate acceptance of the consequences, or not to do at all. You mustn't begin to let people be kind to you.
And no less than in material things were they solicitous to keep from me anything that might worry me. Madge laughed away my apologies for the havoc I made of her engagements, Alec vowed that it was a top-hole way of spending a holiday to sit at my open window, pretending he was smoking outside, while the gentle summer breeze that stirred the curtains blew it all in again. I think his crowning kindness was to get in a barber daily to shave me. Were I to grow a beard I fear it would not be a golden one.
And even Jennie visited me once or twice, which is very much indeed from seventeen who has never known a headache to one who has known more than he cares to think about.
On Jennie's first two visits to me other people were in and out of the room; but on the third occasion I was alone. It was mid-afternoon, and Madge and Alec, I knew, had gone out to pay a call. They had left me everything that I was likely to need until their return, and I had imagined the house to be empty. But Jennie tapped and entered, andasked me how I was. Then she crossed over and stood by the window, where the sun touched the gold of her hair and showed the shadow of her arms within her light sleeves.
"Nothing very amusing to do this afternoon, Jennie?" I asked from my pillow.
"No, only pottering about," she replied.
"Then won't you come and have tea with me presently?"
"I'll order it now if you like."
"Do, and then come back and sit with me unless it bores you."
She went out, and presently returned. She was not particularly good about a sick-room. She gave a superfluous touch to things here and there, and then bent over me and shook my pillow with a gesture that somehow reminded me of that quick little run to her mother's side at the tramway terminus at St Briac.
"Would you like me to read to you?" she asked.
"Thank you—presently perhaps."
"Did they change those flowers this morning?"
I smiled. "There won't be any flowers left in the garden soon, I get so many."
"Then there isn't anything I can do," she said helplessly.
Poor child, I don't think that I myself was entirely the object of her concern—no, not even though I was so blest as to be a link between her and a certain young Englishman who went about in French clothes and was known by a French name. I don't think she quite knew what she wanted, except that it was exquisite to be a little mournful, and to be doing something for somebody. In spite of that impulsive little gesture, I don't think her mother had her confidence. That was rather the compounding of a secrecy than a confidence. It was an atonement, a guilty little reparation that but locked up her secret the more securely. I am aware that young girls are traditionally supposed to fly instantly to their mothers with their troubles of this sort. I can only say that that is not my experience. Far more frequently they will fly to a confidante of their own age, and even once in a while to a person like myself. Hermother would be much, oh, ever so much to her; but she would not be told about that note that had been surreptitiously slipped from hand to hand.
"Well, what have you been doing with yourself for the last three days, Jennie?" I asked.
A Brittany crock of genêts made fragrant the room. Her eyes were fixed on the flowers.
"Yesterday I went for a bicycle ride," she said.
"Oh? I didn't know you had a bicycle here."
"I hadn't. I hired one."
"Where did you go? Anywhere nice?"
Instead of answering my question she said, with her eyes still on the flowers, "I've got something for you, Uncle George."
"And what's that?"
"Here it is."
From some tuck in the region of her waist she drew out a note, which she handed to me. With my elbow on my pillow I read it. It was on a page torn out from a sketch-book, and it ran: